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Brakz0rz writes "Here's a BBCi article by Daniel Etherington with an overview on how videogames translate onto the big screen. I can't say I've been impressed by any such effort so far. The article touches on John Woo's upcoming Metroid adaptation. Etherington writes, "One of these days, someone has just got to make a decent video game movie. How about Peter Jackson doing Zelda? Now that would be promising." I would enjoy that more than the games franchised from the LOTR trilogy."

The reason why games usually make terrible movies is pretty obvious. It's because the movies are usually made out of high-profile action games - to cash in on the name, as is standard practise in Hollywood.

These kinds of games are, of course, plot-free zones. Hence, the movie makers fill the void in an ad-hoc fashion, usually with horrible results.

Speaking of Zelda, anyone remember the old Zelda cartoons that we had on TV once? That's a classic example of what I'm talking about; those cartoons made my eyes bleed. Badly.

I can imagine that it WOULD be possible to make a good movie out of a good, plot-filled game, such as the old Lucasarts/Lucasfilm Games ones. Those would at least be funny. But, that hasn't happened yet. I'm still crossing my fingers...

No, games<->movies don't work. The reason is that they are entertaining in totally different ways, and the translation doesn't work between them.

Example: most adventure/shoot-em-up games are almost all fighting, with the occasional puzzle. These are entertaining because they tax your reflexes or your strategic thinking. It's fun to do that yourself, and so they're entertaining, but it's boring to watch someone else do that for more than about 10 minutes.

Also, because there's so much time spent in fighting & puzzles, the story background and character development in games is often (yes, often, not always, but very often) weak to non-existent. A shining example: Final Fantasy. That game has more character development than most adventure games do, and it was still a boring movie.

Short answer: there's a long gap between things that are fun to *do* and things that are fun to *watch*. The only thing that clearly falls in both catagories is sex, but I'm not going to go there right now.

It's partly time-to-market. It's also partly that most movies are linear narratives and most narratives contain boring parts. And most strictly-linear-narrative games suck. You can make a game out of attacking the Death Star but not out of finding your aunt and uncle burned to death.

Incidentally, Kenobi bloody well knew what was going on. He could have stopped it. I've always been pissed at him for that.

It depends on the game, I dunno if I was the only person watching the Final Fantasy movie thinking "This should be a video game" there was too much in the movie to be explained in that short time frame of a movie. I'm sure any good video game turned into a movie will probably be bad since we're expecting too much of it. And they'd try to make a blockbuster, not a movie that's true to the game. But then again Final Fantasy Avant Children is coming out, that seems like it's true to the story of Final Fantasy and not just trying to be some movie that just happens to have the name of a popular video game in it when having almost nothing to do with the game itself (Mario Brothers.)

There are a couple of basic problems with translating a video game to a movie:

(1) Most video games have thin, unelaborated setup plots. Nobody cares when it's the game, as long as the play/action is good. When it comes time to move things to the silver screen, though, it's much more important.

(2) A good video game movie could be based on a character's adventure in the world set up by the game -- but in addition to simply treating it as a sequence of scenes where the character accomplishes the same goals as the video game (or even some new goals you make up), and throwing in cool effects and kick-butt action, you'd have to make the character emotionally and intellectually three-dimensional. Why do they do what they do? Where are they vulnerable and strong? How do they grow/change over the course of the movie? However, most video game movies don't try to do this at all -- just walk through the levels, kids! -- and so you get bored out of your skull.

"Good Game" is not a descriptive enough term to determine whether or not some bit of content will translate well to another format. Game 'genres' are comparatively less like genres and more like species. You can find common ground between the worst Ahnuld action flick and your favorite movie (assuming they are not the same) - differences in movie genres are all content-based.

But while the ancestor of the arcade genre are arcade action games, graphic adventures have their roots in interactive fiction, MMORPGs hail from MU*s, CRPGs descend from board games, and other physical games translate to video well without need of additional story (e.g. Chessmaster, Hoyle's). Differences in game genres are both form- and content-based, and not to any set ratio.

So the answer fully depends on why the game is "good". If it's good because it has a compelling story, great characters, etc., then duh, it will probably make a good movie. If not, then in the absence of a good script doctor it will not.

On the flip side you don't want movies rendered stupid because they were too afraid to stray from the original storyline. The story should be altered as appropriate to fit the media. What makes a good comic/game/novel, doesn't always makes a good movie. For example. imagine what spider-man would have been like if he rambled on philosophically during the fighting sequences in the movie as much as he does in many of the comics. Or better yet, imagine the confusion the average non-Tolkien reading movie-goer would have felt trying to sit through the enigma that is Tom Bombadil had it not been mercifully excluded.Having said that, I do so hate it when, as you say, the movie deviates so much from the original storyline as to share name only. But this happens even within the same media. Who here truly considers the new Battlestar Galactica an honest remake of the original?A good director, like PJ, can take the elements from the original media that are crucial to the spirit of the story and craft it in such a way that the new product keeps the spirit even if many of the details are changed or missing.

Appalling wasn't it. Yet it was quite possible to make a good film pout of that. Likewise Resident Evil - terrible piece of crap, but there was good potential. The problem seems to be the directors and production crews that take up/get handed these films to make. Personally I think the problem is that the sort of directors/writers who take on these projects are people who love video games, and they are too close to the game to step back and rewrite/reorganise things to properly work as a film - and the sort of writers and directors who would make a good film aren't interested in such projects.

A good story makes a good movie. The Legend of Zelda series more or less historically suck for stories and are about exploration. (I have played and beaten all the games but the N64 ones). In Wind Waker the story was about Hyrule but not about Link. A good story is one where the characters themselves change and learn more about their own selves and manage to change in some capacity. That makes a good movie.

What makes a good video however is being fun and entertaining. Take Metroid as an example. A fun game but no story at all. So now we have a game that is fun to play, but is kinda boring in review. From a game to movie perspective Megaman X makes much more sense and has ore to work with. You have the outsider (X as the first reploid and as such the father of the maverics), the internal conflict of the main character (why and I here and why do I fight), character progression (the destruction and rebirth of Zero and how it affected X's relationship with him).

MGS would make a better movie than any of my previous examples, however. You have a progression of plot with characters reveling much about themselves throughout the game/story as opposed to get key X to find location y and kill boss z.

You know, I actually enjoyed the first Mortal Kombat movie (watching its sequel was like puking though). It was funny, have some good action, some good SFX at the time, a good premise, and a fairly decent script (acting was a little over the top, but you knew that's what they had in mind). Oh yeah, they also had a very catchy techno theme song that to this day I still remember. "Mortal Kombat! bum bum bum..."

I've seen a few posts in this discussion bagging out the Final Fantasy-The Spirits within movie, with complaints like this one:

What sucks though is that lots of these game-movie adaptions stray away from the main story of the series which is what makes the series so unique to begin with. Case in point, Final Fantasy Spirits Within.

I have a slightly different recollection of the movie. I had played one or two of the FF games, and I remember thinking during the cut scenes in FFVII that this really needs to be made into a movie. I got really excited when it was announced that such a thing was to happen.

I finally got to see it, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I found the plot quite FFish, and it seemed to assume a familiarity with the FF style. A friend who came with me didn't quite understand what was going on. I ended up going through the whole FFVII plot with him, and everything seemed to make sense after that.

The main difference is in how the two genres relate to a plot line. In a movie the audience's attention needs to be focussed solely on the story. You can move fairly quickly, develop some complex characters and have two or three subplots moving together. Even if you don't quite understand it, or you miss something, a well made movie should still be understandable.

In a game (RPG at least) you're more concerned with moving the character yourself--designing him or her to be the character best suited to beating up the bad guy at the end while still being able to get through the earlier stages. You have to guess where the story's going to go so you can plan ahead.

You also have to choose whether or not to go on the subquests (if you can find them). Spending a day and a half breeding a golden chocobo would not go down well in a movie!

In a game, forgetting the slightest detail can leave you stranded. I remember spending two whole days flying my airship around the wrong part of the world because I missed a single word in an instruction (again in FFVII). And I wouldn't have got that chocobo if I hadn't got myself a nice walk through off the internet.

These things will have a dramatic effect on the development of the plot and the sorts of things they can do. The fact that the Final Fantasy series use different characters all the time gives more leeway in a movie. Peronally, I think the best way would be to develop the two in tandem, a la the Matrix. I haven't yet played the game so I don't know how well it worked there, but I suspect they were on to something.

I guess the whole experience taught me it's a poor effort if you need to go outside the movie (as my friend found) or the game (that walkthrough was the only thing that kept me in it) to be able to get your money's worth.

Paraphrased: The way a game story and movie story is written is different.

Unless the movie can hire writers that can cut out the parts that make it distinctive as a game, and put more movie ingredients.. a game can be made into a good movie easily.

Take Mortal Kombat. What made it a good fighting game is the variety of characters, cool moves, good control and what not. Isn't that what makes any fighter game good? But when they made the movie, they kept MANY of the characters in it. If they took two of the characters who would be natural enemies, and expand on just that, it may have been better.

Take Mario Bros. Go through many obstacles, save the princess. The movie was the same exact thing minus mushrooms making you grow. As the movie went on, things got harder until the end when things finally resolved.

Now let's take something that may have been a made up game that could have been made into a movie that existed. Let's take an action movie, since they have battles and what not.. not so emotion based. Let's take "The Rock", the Nicholas Cage movie. Cage and Mr Connery have to get back some nasty bio weapons and save 150 hostages. Also have to take out the enemy. It sounds like a drawn out rainbow six mission, no?

So imagine taking the simple elements of a game, and making that a movie. Wouldn't THAT be the key? Zelda 64 isn't a rehash of Zelda or Adventures of Link, right? So why should a movie about Zelda be a rehash of an old video game?

There is nothing about video games that makes them inherently good or bad as movies. The answer is simple studio economics.

When a studio decides to make a movie on a video game, they are trying to cash in on the name. It is self marketing. People will go see the movie because they know the game, not because it is a good movie. So to maximize profits, the studio hires the cheapest (i.e. least compitent) writer, director, actors. Bam! Bad movie. It has absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter.

For example, Ridley Scott took a B-Horror script by Dan O'Bannon and turned it into a classic called Alien.

btw, Mortal Combat is a decent action picture, with a great theme song by KMFDM, and good performance by Christopher Lambert. Resident Evil is a pretty good picture, with Mila kicking zombie ass. The rest that I have seen are best forgotten.

Mortal Kombat made for a decent movie because the basic plot to the game is simply a rehash of Enter the Dragon, with some supernatural world-hanging-in-the-balance stuff thrown in to freshen things up a bit, and the movie remained faithful to this basic idea.

A diverse group of fighters, both heroic and villainous, are invited to a secret martial arts tournament on an island, and fight it out in a series of battles that culminate in one of the heroes defeating the shadowy host of the tournament in single combat. There were even characters directly lifted from Enter the Dragon- Liu Kang for Bruce Lee's virtuous character, Johnny Cage for John Saxon's playboy, Shang Tsung for the evil guy with the claw hand. However, instead of coming off as just a lame rip-off, Mortal Kombat mostly stays within the realm of homage of it and innumerable other kung fu flicks, and throws in some special effects that were pretty sweet for their time, making it, if not exactly a classic of the genre, at least watchable.

Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, however, was an abomination, and should never been made. It utterly fails in all areas of filmmaking- the dialogue is wooden and often unintentional funny, the special effects are not on par with the original released two years earlier and look incredibly cheap, and most damning for what should boil down to a kung fu flick, the fight choreography really sucks.

It's usually a terrible omen for a film sequel if half the original cast declines to return to their roles in the sequel. As the parent mentions, even Christopher Lambert avoided this one- and as a perusal of his IMDB entry shows , it's quite rare of him to pass up the opportunity to act in a terrible, terrible sequel. If he acted in the Highlander sequels, but not Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, what does that say about the latter movie?

One of the key things that seems to be missing from game/film adaptations is the element of challenge. In a game, the player has to put in some kind of effort in order to progress the story. In a film there is no direct challenge, unless it be the mental effort required to understand what the film maker is trying to communicate (not a dominant feature in a lot of game adaptations), everything is laid out in a neat linear fashion.

Films that encourage some kind of mental effort on the part of the viewer, like "Run Lola, Run", come close to capturing the game experience. Instead of making things 'easy' for the audience, the film contains challenges, like the non-linear story structure that requires some mental activity on the part of the viewer in order to increase the enjoyment of the film.

It's a little like the better mystery films that actively involve the audience in a guessing game, people enjoy the challenge of trying to advance the story themselves by picking up on the clues in the plot.

Although discouraged _during_ a film (I have offended any number of friends by loudly telling them to shut up as they try to further my understanding by explaining their interpretation of the plot while a movie plays) the other factor in film enjoyment that can mirror gaming is the requirement to discuss the experience with other 'players' in order to further the development of the story. An example of this would be David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" TV series (has he ever thought of designing a game? That's something I'd shell some money out for), it created a loose community of people who were actively involved in the challenge of not only trying to figure out whodunnit, but discussing the story itself to further their understanding of the narrative.

Before I saw Event Horizon, I always thought that the original DOOM would make a GREAT movie. In the right hands, all of the basic concepts for a pretty interesting action adventure movie were there. Granted, DOOM is a mindless and purely action-oriented FPS, but if someone had gotten on the ball and made a movie before the whole "survival horror"/zombie vs. modern technology fad caught on in both video games and movies, I'd always felt a carefully planned DOOM movie would have been great. The problem now is that many of the traits that were first pioneered by DOOM have already been done, and poorly at that, so anything in a DOOM movie made now would probably just seem too cliche and corny.

Tomb Raider wasn't that bad of a game to base a movie off of, being essentially based off of Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones character. Instead of a globetrotting American professor you have a globetrotting British society woman, but the settings and potential plots are not significantly different. Certainly Lara Croft's mysteriously backstory could have led to a gripping script, and her John Woo action stylings could have let to a much grittier and more intense movie than Spielberg's fist fights ever could.

What sets the two apart is that Jones was written, directed, and acted by people at the top of their field. Harrison Ford injected character into Indiana Jones in a way that Jolie is still trying to come to grips with, and Spielberg ensured that there were plenty of "moments" in the movie where the audience would really feel for the characters.

The amount of skill required to pull off a great movie, like a great game, is tremendous. While these movies are handled by second-string directors they will continue to be terrible. There is nothing inherently wrong in basing a movie off of a game, any more than basing it off of a book or a song, but it will always take a skilled cast and crew to make a movie good no matter what it is based off of.

Actually, it's a different Zelda in every game. It's almost always a different Link too. They occur in different time periods (possibly timelines). Reconstructing the Zelda chronology is a continuing project among Zelda fans.

I think Ocarina has just enough plot to fill a movie, provided we don't have to sit through eight dungeons and bosses.

Those help messages are in the game because there's always new players, and because many items (like the Hookshot) are not immediately obvious. Bottles are actually rather tricky for new players -- without that help message, most would never guess that you could do things like bottle fairies. It'd be nice if they could be turned off, but on the other hand, since there's not really a huge number of special items in Zelda relative to the length of the game, I think the description and music fanfare (Dum-duh-dah-DAAA!) lend a sense of ceremony to whenever you get a new goodie.

But I don't see how a good Zelda movie could be made. Ignoring the fact that Hollywood only makes movie-games when it's looking to make a quick buck and never when they want to produce something of artistic merit, Zelda's just too far outside their definition of "cool." If they made a Zelda game, you can bet they'd get someone really annoying to play Link.

Remember: three of Nintendo's big four heroes, Mario, Link and Samus either never or hardly ever get dialogue in their games. (The fourth is Kirby, who also never gets dialogue, but neither does anyone else in his games.) I think it'd wreck the characters to give them dialogue. Just like Sonic, and thus the Sonic Adventure games, seem a lot lamer when he's got a speaking part.

People have spoken that a movie and a game to both work well need a good plot and good action. Homeworld was both. The action in the game was great, you had the plot of the story and the characters where there developing as it went along and you really felt a part of the story versus just watching and have you head slump over in bordom.

If they made a Zelda game, you can bet they'd get someone really annoying to play Link.

Have you ever seen the cartoon series [planetnintendo.com]? I made the mistake of downloading the first episode once, and it was absolutely terrible. Link had the ridiculous catchphrase, "Well excuuuuuse me, Princess!" that he said nearly every other line. In order for a Zelda movie to work, they'd have to find someone that would kind of be a cross between Frodo and Pippin from the Lord of the Rings movies, and avoid anyone with annoying cuteness.

Unfortunately, most of the focus of Zelda games is acquiring new stones or trinkets or other items so you can eventually have a showdown with Ganon, so I'm not sure how well this would translate into a movie. Watching the main character work by himself (or with a fairy or a talking boat) to collect various items would definitely not work. Any writer would have to be able to draw on what has made the Zelda series so successful - empathy for Link, the loss of innocence and childhood, the desire to help and be heroic, and the obvious implied attraction between Link and Zelda - and create a fresh new story from that.

I think it would be easier to accomplish that than making a Metroid movie with more than one character (unlike the game), but I'm not a screenwriter.

Wing Commander the game series, particularly III and IV, were actually great sci-fi cinema. The cutscenes themselves could be cobbled together with no changes (well, not all the branches, but one path through them) and played on a computer screen, into a camera, on the Sci-Fi channel and would probably get great ratings and sell DVD sets.

The *games were better movies than the movie* by a long way, and had bigger stars (Jason Bernard, Malcolm MacDowell, Mark Hamill, Biff from back to the future I wish I could remember his name, John Rhys-Davies, and John Spencer from West Wing).

Those games were full-on big-budget movies, certainly better than any sci-fi movie available at the time (the mid '90s being something of an abhorable drought as far as science-fiction cinema went). Wing Commander IV was actually a *great* movie.

Exactly! "Let's Kill the Zombies Before They Eat Our Brains" movies are almost impossible to screw up, even if you have a relatively large budget... I thought Resident Evil was decent enough example of the genre. Just don't ask how close it was to the game, though, never played them =)

The only bad thing is that for some reason I'm constantly reminded of the movie every time I open up the map in Metroid Prime...